Another day another strategy

I'm throwing the baby out with the bath water. What I mean by that, is I'm throwing all reasonable thought of how the market should be traded out the window. I'm guessing we have all read the books, forum posts, blogs, etc...telling use how we should trade. Typically it goes like this, make sure you have defined your risk by putting in a hard stop-loss. Make sure you have a risk-reward of greater than 1:2. Another...never ever average down when trading. Well I have followed that advice for the better part of 6-7 years and it has not helped me accomplish consistent profitability. Now, I need to preface that I think this logic can be profitable; however, I think at this point in my trading I'm going to go down a fork in the road.

The reason I'm taking a fork in the road is because I have continued to struggle. At the same time, I came across a forum at ForexFactory by user FTI. It is a very long difficult read, of which I'm still not done reading, and at the same time it was very rewarding. FTI is a retired big-time trader for a bank. He talked about the way he trades that goes against just about anything you will read in a book. He trades without stops and he averages down. I do need to preface that he trades very much in control and knows his risks.

Something just clicked with me in the forum that FTI wrote. So as a result, I'm getting rid of my strict trading strategy and focusing on a looser more discretionary trading strategy. I'm very much in a testing mode at this point because I don't have the strategy specifically mapped out. I am not going to be trading exactly how FTI trades. I have my own flavor of that trading style that I am adopting.

For the last 2 weeks I have been studying and trying to perfect this new strategy. To review, the first two weeks of December I started going down the road using the strategy that Jacko(from FF) was trading successfully. It turns out that it was not working for me. When you start a new strategy and the first two weeks are both negative weeks it is not a good sign. So then I started my new strategy and right off the bat it was profitable for the first two weeks it was implemented. By no means a sure things because I have some major issues I need to resolve to make this a long-term profitable strategy.

I'll try and go into some details about the strategy in the near future.

Interesting Result

My first week of trading has slipped by and I'm finding something interesting. First off, my week included some good trades and some bad trades. In the end, the week ended down by almost -2%. Regardless of my trading strategy whether good or bad; I'm finding if I had a better strategy to move my trades to break-even, after moving n-pips in profit, I would be up +3.9%. That is almost at 6% swing simply by implementing a better exit strategy.

My current strategy is to move a trade to break-even as soon as possible. Sometimes this is when a trade moved 10 pips to profit other times it will be around 30 pips. It all depends on what I'm trying to do on that trade. However, the problem comes in when I have a trade going when I'm sleeping. What usually happens is I set my 50, 70, 100 pip stop-loss and while I'm sleeping the trade goes into profit by a significant amount, not enough to trigger my profit target, then the trade quickly snaps back and hits my stop-loss and instead of breaking-even I lose money.

This same issue came up when I was trading a few months ago. It came up again and again and I did not do anything about it. I don't think a simple trailing stop will fix the problem. I am trading on Oanda which does not have any type of conditional orders, which is what I need. The other alternative is to have some type of alert system when a price level is reached to where I can correctly place my stop, after waking me up! I'm not thrilled about this option because I have a day job and I can't be tired all the time. When you are trading a $500 account it doesn't quite seem worth it, however; if I could have a break-through in my trading and was making $5000 a day I wouldn't have a problem waking up a couple times in the middle of the night.

Needless to say, my number one task is to figure out how I can better manage my stops at all hours of the day and night.